A wit taking perverse pleasure in the kitchen
An ‘anti-cookbook’ by the pugnacious novelist and critic Jonathan Meades amuses Lewis Jones
The Plagiarist in the Kitchen by Jonathan Meades 176pp, Unbound, £20
Jonathan Meades is a perverse dandy, an erudite wit with an advanced taste for the frankly disgusting. He has made many films for television about generally overlooked aspects of architecture – golf courses and caravan parks, the buildings of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Birmingham – featuring surrealist sight-gags in which he is run over by bicycles and so on. He has written some startlingly filthy fiction, and a lot of journalism. For many years he was a restaurant critic, so he knows a bit about food. He once cooked me lunch, which was good if excessively meaty – lamb, with nothing else.
His latest book, from the crowdsourced publisher Unbound, is a sturdy volume, made to withstand the splashes and spills of cooking, with a picture of him on the cover looking pugnacious – shoulders squared, fists clenched – in his trademark black suit and sunglasses.
His pugnacity is general. Vehemently anti-religious, in one of the random asides that pepper his 125 recipes he dismisses the eucharist as “cannibalistic” and “half-witted”. A recipe for leg of lamb, remembered from the Alice B Toklas Cookbook, recalls her celebrated formula for hashish fudge, and provokes him to a rant against cannabis (“wretched stuff ”). “Stick to acid and opium,” is his advice.
But most of his targets are more strictly gastronomic. Television chefs are “crass tossers with the spray-on grins, gestures and catch-phrases of the wretchedly, desperately, aspirantly characterful”, while “professional” mushroom pickers are a “cadre of thieving bastards”.
He is hostile to the very idea of extra-virgin olive oil – “in olive oil, as in life, the impure is more satisfying than the pure” – and still more so to the British banger: “If an English sausage is slurry in a condom, English sausage ‘meat’ is unprotected slurry.”
His approach to ingredients is sometimes gleefully violent. Eels, for instance: “To kill an eel you need a brick and a concrete surface. Hit it on the head. Then hit it again.” Or chickens, which must be spatchcocked by breaking their legs and wings and then flattening them with maximum force: “Remember, it is dead, it doesn’t care how rough your love is”. Meades describes The Plagiarist in the Kitchen as “an anti-cookbook”, and a paean “to the notion that in the kitchen there is nothing new and nor can there be anything new. It’s all theft.” But his perversity obliges him to add that, “Were it a work of genuine plagiarism I would not have admitted it.”
“All that’s original,” he declares of his book, “are my monochrome treyfs.” The noun treyf does not feature in the OED, but it is apparently a Yiddish adjective for “not kosher”, and his wildly sinister and disturbingly cloacal illustrations are decidedly not kosher.
Some of his recipes are simple to the point of bluntness – for a ham sandwich, for example, or for grilled mackerel: “It needs 4-5 minutes each side on/under a very hot grill. Do not add any sort of sauce. Just salt.” Others, such as that for cassoulet, are dauntingly elaborate.
A notorious lover of offal, he includes four recipes for tripe, and the furious admonitions that run like tickertape across the bottom of each page include: “GET TREATMENT FOR SQUEAMISHNESS”. (“F--- THE GUESTS” is another.) Even Meades has his limits, though, and his fondness for hare as a creature leads him to end his recipe for cooking one – in a sauce of offal, blood, chocolate and gin – with the words: “Serve with buttered noodles and guilt.”
His tortilla sounds convincing, as does his cheese soufflé. He offers five recipes for risotto, three of which I intend to try. And I liked the look of his fig and ham tart, until I reached its conclusion: “Leave to cool. Taste. Chuck in bin.” He calls it a “wreck of a dish” and his thesis on why it is quite so emetic leads him to the deferred point of the chapter: a loving recollection of the menu at the Regret Rien, the appalling restaurant in Mike Leigh’s 1990 film Life Is Sweet, which included Pork Cyst, King Prawn ( just one) in Jam Sauce, Black Pudding and Camembert Soup, Tripe Souffle, Liver in Lager and Tongues in a Rhubarb Hollandaise.
Meades reasonably observes that “no one reads a cookbook cover to cover”, but for obvious reasons I did this one, and I don’t regret it. It is quite the funniest I’ve read (which is not saying much), and surprisingly appetising. Its recipes may not be original, but its author certainly is.
He includes a bibliography of the writers he has plagiarised, chief among Anon (“the greatest of all cooks”), but also Pierre Koffmann and Rowley Leigh, Fergus Henderson and Matthew Fort, Jane Grigson and Elizabeth David. Of the last he notes that her work survives “not because of its culinary utility but because of the quality of the prose, the ethnographic inquisitiveness and ultimately the pleasure that is to be derived from a lucid presence”.
To plagiarise him in turn, the same may be said of this book.
‘He despises the idea of extra-virgin: “In olive oil, as in life, the impure is more satisfying than the pure”’
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